Books on Population and Resources

by Paul Morland
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5 books
Population is an often underrated explanatory factor. There is little in history or in the contemporary world that cannot be better understood when the light of demography is shone on it. Economic booms and busts, revolution and stability, war and peace are all better grasped when seen through the light of demography, of the births, deaths and migrations that mark all eras and places. This is especially true since humans started to emerge at the end of the eighteenth century from the 'Malthusian Trap' of perennially high birth and death rates. The debate around the relationship of humans to resources - are we irremediably destined to suffer from a lack of food and other necessities? - is one every thinking and engaged citizen should understand
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An Essay on the Principle of Population

Thomas Robert Malthus, 2013
This is where it all began. Reacting against what he saw as naive Utopianism on the part of Enlightenment thinkers - many of them friends of his father - Malthus saw humans endlessly breeding up to the frontiers of what the planet could support. Read the first edition - published in 1798 - to get Malthus at his most parsimonious.

The Population Bomb

Paul R. Ehrlich, 1971
This classic statement of neo-Malthusianism suggests that nearly a century and a half after Malthus's death, nothing much had changed. Although the frontier had shifted outward, so too had the global population. Technical innovation and progress had bought us only so much time. The game was over and now mass starvation faced humanity. The book is wrong, but essential reading to understand the debate.

Fewer

How the New Demography of Depopulation Will Shape Our Future
Ben J. Wattenberg, 2004
An early observation of the falling rate of births in even quite poor countries, the spread of low fertility and the fact that this meant we were never going to hit the Malthusian and Ehrlichian disasters that had been foretold.

The Bet

Paul Ehrlich, Julian Simon, and Our Gamble over Earth's Future
Paul Sabin, 2013
Ehrlich and anti-Malthusian Julian Simon bet on the movement of commodity prices. Contra Ehrlich, Simon believed that human innovation is almost boundless and that Malthusians are far too pessimistic about what humans can achieve to surpass their material constraints, especially if market forces are given enough free rein to stimulate initiative. Simon won the bet.

Not the End of the World

How We Can Be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet
Hannah Ritchie, 2024
Bringing the debate and the data up to date, Ritchie shows how Paul Simon's optimistic perspective continues to trump the pessimists. This is no call to environmental complacency but rather a celebration of the human ability to face and overcome problems and create a materially improving world for all.